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How do I discover if I am Provisionally Adopted?

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To discover if you are affected by a Provisional Adoption Order issued in the UK is quite easy.  It is a two step process and requires that you have access to your UK Birth Certificate.

1) Your first step is to look at the long version of your birth certificate issued by the General Register Office.  There are two versions of your birth certificate, a long version (complete information) and a short version (contains your name, gender and place of birth).  It is only the long one that will give you the necessary information.  On a birth certificate for someone adopted, column (6) contains the the date of the adoption order and description of the court by which it was made.  My column (6) contains the words:

Provisional Adoption Order, Second October 1969, Sheffield County Court

If you find similar wording it means that you too are provisionally adopted.

2) Your next step after confirming that you are provisionally adopted is to look for further information of an adoption.  This would take the shape of an adoption form issued in the country that your adopting parents come from.  You should also have other identifying papers or a social security number issued by the same country as the adoption happened in.  So for example I would have been issued with a social security number from the USA if I had been legally adopted there.  If you cannot find any of these papers then you will need to ask your adopting parents for them, this can of course be tricky.  At this point if you have found these papers or your parents have given them to you, everything is fine and you will have been legally adopted.

If on the other hand you have not been able to locate these papers yourself and your adopting parents do not have them then you will need ask them for the details of your legal adoption.  Once you have the details you will need to approach the authorities and ask them to do a search for your adoption papers.  In my search I have found the authorities to be sympathetic and helpful in this.  If at this point your papers are discovered, read through them to verify that everything is correct and rest assured that you were legally adopted.

If you, like I did, discover at this point that there never was an adoption in any country, you have entered into a profoundly strange and difficult place.  The first thing you must do is seek legal help to sort this mess out.  I wish that I could give clear guidelines but currently there are none.  The second thing you are going to need is an adoption counsellor to help you realign your life as there are some major adjustments ahead.  I wish I could say that everything will be sorted and go back to normal, but unfortunately the fact that you were not legally adopted ensures that it cannot return to normal even if and when everything else is sorted.

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I had been sorting out our official papers following my son’s eighteenth birthday when I spotted it for the first time.  In a separate column on my adoption birth certificate were the words ‘Provisional Adoption Order granted October 1969 by Sheffield County Court’.  I know that I had seen this thousands of times before but the words had never really sunk in.  I had always just breezed over them without thinking too much about it, I guess that I just assumed that this was the standard wording on everyones certificate.  Yet this time I looked a little closer.

provisional –

prəˈvɪʒ(ə)n(ə)l/
adjective
  • arranged or existing for the present, possibly to be changed later.
  1. “a provisional government”

What did this mean? That I was provisionally adopted?  If that was the case then where was my official adoption certificate?

I started to look into what this Order might be and came to this page on Wikipedia that dealt with the Adoption Act of 1953.  The key sentence is this one: The Act also created a “provisional adoption order”, issuable by the High Court or County Court, which allows an adopter not domiciled in Britain to adopt a child under the law of the country in which he lives. Such adoption orders require six months notice, and the child must have been in the adopter’s care in Britain for at least six months. Orders last for two years, and are designed to act as a place holder until the adopter’s nation authorises the adoption of the child.  

All of this meant that my ‘intended parents’ had been given a travel permit in order to leave the country with me for the purpose of adoption.  This was not an adoption.  Surely my parents had adopted me in their country of origin? But had they?

After a day of working through the implications of what this meant I reluctantly called my adopted mother and asked.  That was when the final nail was hammered home – I was told that they had never even started the adoption process in their country of origin or in any other country.  And so it came crashing home to me, I could not use my pre-adoption identity because of the rules of the UK government, but neither could I use the identity that I had been given because legally it was not mine.  In the eyes of the law, my birth parents had given me up but my intended adoptive parents had never legally adopted me either.  My birth certificate should have been indicated a completed adoption, but in actual fact I had found nothing permanent.